Critical essays on literature

critical essay heart tale tell

That the "exquisite portraiture" is only noticed by himself the narrator justifies in language that confirms the aesthetic analogy, since it echoes Poe's own poetics: the narrator assumes that his namesake had been concerned only with his "intended effect," and that he had, with "the masterly air of the copyist," disclaimed "the letter" for the "full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin" (TS 435). When the narrator, in a scene reminiscent of "The Tell-Tale Heart," creeps to the bedside of his sleeping rival to examine his "countenance" by lamplight, his reaction -- no longer mere "vexation" -- embodies his own sense of impending dissolution: "My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror."

critical essay on the tell tale heart

But variations on it occur elsewhere, in "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-Tale Heart," in "Ligeia," "Morella," and "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," three tales in which metempsychosis is the motif, and also in one of his most oblique and effective stories, "The Man of the Crowd." But the Doppelgänger theme is an important one also in the stories of the detective Dupin, and in "The Gold Bug." These stories, far apart as they seem to be from Arthur Gordon Pym, are nonetheless related to and illuminated by it.

critical essay james joyces Ulysses

Throughout Ulysses the sea appears as a symbol of the chaotic flux of experience, the element; drowning is defeat, submergence, the death of the spirit in the overwhelming flood of kinetic appetencies. Stephen fears death by water. The drowned man objectifies his fear of suffocation, his need to rise above the waves, to swim in the element -- in other words, to achieve a free stasis of spirit by understanding and accepting himself, his predicament, and his necessities. He must, as he clearly realizes, launch out. When the chapter ends, he is literally homeless. We do not know where he is going, nor does he.

critical essay letter scarlet

One disadvantage of the new volume, he feared, was that the romantic improbabilities became too glaring by being brought so close to the present time. Still, as the days went on, he continued to prefer it to The Scarlet Letter as having more merit, though he supposed that it would not make so much noise, the preliminary chapter being what gave The Scarlet Letter its vogue. Sometimes he worried lest he had refined upon the principal character too much for popular appreciation, and there continued the fear that the Romance should be found at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which he had invested it.

critical essay metamorphosis

All the authors are forced to the conclusion that endothermal processes exist on a considerable scale during metamorphosis. It is to be noted, lastly, that during larval life there is at each moult a severe but transient diminution of heatproduction; this gives colour to the idea (which we have already encountered on p. 465 in relation to the course of events in the hemimetabolous bugs) that metamorphosis may be, in a certain sense, a very exaggerated moult, in which the whole larval organisation, and not merely the cuticle, is dispensed with. The composition of the pupal haemolymph has been studied mostly on the silkworm and the hawk-moth…

critical essay of to kill a mockingbird

"He's a tough baby" or "tough cookie" expressed a similar contrast. Occasionally even gentility--mock or real-is pressed into service as a belying device. Wild Bill Hickok used his fancy buckskins as a decoy in several legendary encounters. Mocked as a dude by saloon roughs, he teaches them a violent lesson. On a more searching level in our own times we have the character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. His gentlemanly presence conceals his authority with a rifle, just as it belies his ability to speak out against the violent bigots of a Southern town.

critical essays on to kill a mockingbird

Whether or not poor whites did indeed lynch Pippen, Harden, and Clark, the ability to blame the lynching on such people served a useful purpose. Such reasoning absolved the better classes of any real responsibility for the racial abuse and mindless violence that wracked Alabama. Even fiction gave poor whites no respite. When Alabama novelist Harper Lee crafted To Kill a Mockingbird, a compelling novel of racism, lynching, and moral courage, she relied on familiar stereotypes: an innocent, naive black man, Tom Robinson; a racially enlightened and sympathetic
professional man, lawyer Atticus Finch; and the villains of the novel, Bob Ewell and his daughter Mayella, who accused Robinson of rape in order to disguise her own sexual flirtation and her father's drunken violence.

to kill a mockingbird critical essays

As Lee depicted the Ewells, they were friendless "poor white trash," ne'er-do-wells who lived on a relief check, drank too much whiskey, seldom wore shoes, hauled water in buckets from a spring, infrequently bathed, suffered from chronic ground itch, and did not attend school. Indeed, Atticus Finch's primary strategy in his defense of Tom Robinson was to compromise Mayella's testimony by revealing her to be white trash and thus less believable to the white jury than even a Negro. Mayella played into his hands, taking offense immediately when Finch referred to her as "Miss Mayella" or "Ma'am."

critical essay on catch 22

The traps laid for him by Orr have a way out, as we discover at the end of Catch-22, when Yossarian, at last learning from Orr's example, rows to Sweden, using a dixie-cup spoon while fishing for cod off the back of his life raft in waters (the Mediterranean) in which there are no cod. The trap closing on him in this scene, however, in which Aarfy serves as the voice of the war machine's inner logic, offers no way out. Yossarian's literalist intelligence is unequal to the task of comprehension, not because the meaning of this experience is obscure, but because in this situation a literalist intelligence only mirrors the very obstacle confronting it.

critical essay on death of salesman

Excepting Charley, the principal characters of Death of a Salesman share the same condition of being torn between the conflicting claims of ideality and actuality; and in this capacity the interrelations among them serve to extend and reinforce the rhythmic articulation of the play on a variety of formal levels. Among the consequences of the inner conflicts and contradictions of Willy Loman and his sons is their uncertainty and confusion concerning their own identities, a circumstance of which each shows himself to be aware at some point in the play. So Biff reveals to his mother, "I just can't take hold, Mom. I can't take hold of some kind of a life."